MailChimp Launches $1 Million Integration Fund

Update (5/15/15): After pledging $4 million to developers with great ideas, we’ve discontinued our integration fund. To learn more about the 750+ web services that connect with MailChimp, visit our Integrations Directory.

There are two questions people ask me all the time, and I always surprise them with my answers.

First, they bring up our recent growth spurt, and they ask what our "silver bullet" was. Most think it was the introduction of our freemium plan, but that’s not the case. I don’t think there is a silver bullet anymore (I say this, after chasing it for about a decade). I think you just have to work hard for about 10 years before you know what you’re doing (btw, I still don’t know what I’m doing). But I *can* definitely say that one of the best investments we ever made as a company was in our API. It’s probably the best marketing we’ve ever done. I’ve joked about this before, but it’s true — if you’re an early-stage technology company, and you’re thinking about hiring sales people, or some marketing rock star, don’t do it. Just work on your API. Then, integrate with some great companies with open APIs (check out The Small Business Web), and use their popularity to grow your own customer base. Then, before you know it, new companies will start integrating with you to leverage your customer base. In the meantime, you’re all naturally promoting each other (technical blog posts and knowledge base articles are really marketing), and ecosystems start to form around you.

Second, people ask me how/where we got our funding. We actually never got any funding. We didn’t even take out any 2nd mortgages, or use credit card debt. We funded ourselves with paying clients. See, in the early days, we were so jaded from the dot-com fallout that we thought all VCs were evil, bank loans and lines of credit weren’t that much better, and IPOs were signs of the apocalypse. So we went out and did web-dev work. All our little projects are what basically paid the bills while we built MailChimp on the side. Okay, granted, that wasn’t so much "strategy" as it was "trying to stay afloat" but still — it’s what made us what we are today: a profitable, privately owned company with half a million users.

Start small, fund yourself with paying projects, and build up a strong API. We think it’s a pretty smart approach, and we’d like to encourage all the startups and entrepreneurs out there to try it too.

In fact, we’ve been practicing this approach for a while now without even realizing it. A small startup would approach us with some crazy powerpoint presentation or boilerplate "revenue sharing" proposal where they’d tell us about how they’re going to send us bajillions of customers in exchange for x% of the money or something. We’d say, "Um, you don’t even have any customers right now, do you?" And they’d answer, "Um, no." Then we’d ask them if they’ve even built a product, and they’d usually answer the same way. So, partly just to avoid more paperwork and more pitches, we’d offer them a few thousand dollars to fund their integration, and tell them that if customers like it, we’d promote it more.

Just recently we figured, "Why not turn this into an official fund, and make it a process?" It sure would beat all the other cheesy, "Integrate with us, and win an iPad!" kinda promotions. Plus, it aligns perfectly with our philosophy.

Got an idea that could integrate with MailChimp’s delivery platform? Let us fund it. But no powerpoint presentations, please.

Hi Nick, I’m not sure it can be construed that way, but you never know with legalese. If anything, I imagine it would cover any instance where we were already thinking of implementing the same idea. Ya never know. I’ll ask our counsel to explain in more detail. I can tell you that multiple people internally (mostly engineers) will review your integration proposal, so that we can judge it. Keep in mind that if your idea is still in super stealth mode, you don’t need to apply in order to integrate — our API is open.

You know what, after I posted that I wondered what I was worrying about. I think the fact that you actually put something on there rang an alarm bell for some reason, otherwise it wouldn’t have crossed my mind. I mean, you guys are offering people a chance to get some help – which is fantastic.

At the end of the day we’ll implement an integration anyway as it’s always been a plan, but if there’s a chance of some help to keep us in coffee, midnight oil and bananas then it would be rude not to apply!

Hi Nick, Following up on what Ben said here is some added detail about the language that concerned you (let’s call that language the “License” for clarity.) The License as it is written won’t give us the right to create a similar application based on your idea. We wouldn’t do that anyways but just to be clear that License wouldn’t give us the right to do that even if we wanted to. What the License does let us do is circulate (meaning forward on, print out, and show internally) your submission to those individuals here who are involved in the selection process without incurring any liability. Really, the License is in there just in case someone decided to include any copyrighted materials in their submission. I hope this eases your concerns and I am glad the legalese didn’t scare you off!

We have built a CMS for mobile sites. We’ve already gotten the ConstantContact integration completed, and we have the MailChimp integration started.We really, really want to get MailChimp in our system, as you are one of the most popular email marketing systems amongst my network.

I’ll fill out the application now, but wanted to leave you a note to let you know that we are really excited about this announcement!

Congratulations, folks. We’ve spent a similar 10 years working on sending files to people. Awful long time on something so simple and ordinary, but like you the trick was finding out how to do it well. We’re launching version 4.0 shortly (with Mailchimp Inside(tm)).

Great idea about the integration fund. We’re just beginning to understand our growing user-base (60,000 people a month we touch). We’ve loved using chimp and foresee a lot more in the future. We rave to everyone about it (We used to be a CC user).

Ben, it’s refreshing to hear about your approach to the business side of things, we follow a similar model of self-funding through clients and by putting out a great product/service. In today’s world of VCs and Angel Investors and people across the business spectrum advising based on exit strategies rather than focusing on delivering really valuable tools it’s good to see others succeeding giving it the old fashioned approach.

The integration fund is just another step in that direction and it’s nice to see the mailchimp folks reaching out to the community not only to help themselves, but to help some of these startups. Keep up the good work!

We’ve worked with the guys from Ebizmarts and have to say that their Magento integration is excellent. The Mailchimp extension makes it so easy for merchants to keep their mailing list up to date – whether the unsubscribe / subscribe comes from inside Magento or Mailchimp.

We’ve shared some ideas with them to make the product even better in eCommerce and they’ll be investigating it. Some financial support for their project would make this possible and make it truly awesome.

Just want to voice my support for Ebizmarts and the superb work they are doing integrating Mail Chimp into Magento. We use their extensions on *every* project we roll out and would be lost without them.

It would be fantastic to see some kind of official backing from Mail Chimp for these guys!

Great idea. We at http://www.movyloshop.com are into mobile commerce and already offering our merchants the possibility to create mobile marketing campaigns via SMS, QR codes and…email: it will be great to integrate your APIs to use Mailchimp for tha mail part.
S

I am just a user of mailchimp (paid on the one hand and freemium on the other) but think your approach to business is so spot on, if you ever come to Shanghai I will ensure you have a free massage (relaxing) and a free Delicious! session that will make you look 10 years younger – just like when you embarked on the mailchimp journey.

Your post is nearly a year old by the funding application is still posted and I just recently discovered it. Our small nonprofit is interested in applying – is this still open for new projects? We love you guys!

We are a company from Spain, our client is going to use your API version 1.3 in its web application in order to put clients in contact with providers, due to a confidenciality contract we cant explain the project too much or give away too much data. Which data would be necessary to give to you in order to apply for the fund?

Should our final client ask for the funding or can we as developers ask for it?

Hello Pilar – To apply for funding through the Integration Fund, just fill out the application here – http://mailchimp.com/about/integration-fund/. You as a developer can ask to receive the funding. In order for us to be able to assess whether or not to fund the project we will need a bit more information than provided here. Primarily we are looking for how the integration will help to increase the utility of MailChimp for our customer base. So, for example, an integration with a popular CRM or CMS is interesting to us because it will be very helpful to many MailChimp users.